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Sauce, A Good (for Steaks)
1 oz. of whole black pepper. 1/2 oz. of allspice. 1/2 oz. of grated horseradish. INGREDIENTS.-1 oz. of whole bicck pepper, oz. of allspice, 1 oz. of salt, oz. of grated horseradish, 1/2 oz. of pickled shalots, 1 pint of mushroom ketchup or walnut pickle.
AVERAGE COST, 9d.
Pound the ingredients finely in a mortar, and put them into the ketchup or walnutliquor. Let them stand for a fortnight, when strain off the liquor and bottle for use. Either pour a little of the sauce over the steaks, or mix it in the gravy.
SEASONABLE. This can be made at any time.
Note. In using a jar of pickled walnuts, there quantity is frequently left a large quantity of liquor. This quantity y of liquor. This should be converted into a sauce like the above and will be found a very useful relish.
A steeped store sauce rather than a cooked one: whole spices and aromatics infuse in mushroom ketchup or leftover walnut-pickle liquor for two weeks, then are strained out. The text has come through with some fractions lost, so read the quantities with care.
- Garbled quantities"1 oz. of whole bicck pepper" is whole black pepper, and the entries reading simply "oz. of allspice" and "oz. of grated horseradish" have lost their fractions in printing. The shalots are printed as 1/2 oz.; a half-ounce is a reasonable reading for the allspice and horseradish too. Do not guess upward.
- Salt is the one to watch1 oz. of salt into 1 pint of an already very salty ketchup or pickle brine makes a concentrate. It is meant to be used by the spoonful. Taste before adding any to a gravy, and salt the gravy afterwards, not before.
- Mushroom ketchupNot tomato ketchup. It is a thin, near-black liquid of salted mushrooms, dark and savoury with no sugar. Still sold by British specialists; a good mushroom or anchovy-free umami sauce is the nearest substitute, though nothing matches it exactly.
- Walnut pickle liquorThe vinegar-and-spice liquid left in a jar of pickled walnuts, which is what the closing note is about. If you have no walnut jar, the mushroom ketchup version is the same recipe.
- ShalotsShallots, here the pickled kind. If using fresh shallots instead, the sauce will keep less well, since the pickled ones bring their own acid.
- PoundingA mortar bruises the peppercorns and allspice so they release oil without shattering into dust that will not strain out cleanly. A few pulses in a spice grinder does the job; avoid grinding to powder or the liquid stays cloudy.
- The fortnightSteep in a sealed glass jar out of direct light, shaking it every day or two. Cool room temperature is fine given the salt and vinegar; refrigerate if your kitchen runs warm. Strain through muslin and bottle.
- Yield and keepingAbout a pint — enough for many months of steaks. Bottled tightly and kept cool, it holds well; discard it if it ever smells yeasty or fermented rather than sharp.
Sauces of this kind were the domestic answer to the bottled "store sauces" that filled Victorian grocers' shelves — Harvey's sauce, mushroom and walnut ketchups, and the Worcestershire that Lea and Perrins had been selling since the 1830s. All of them work on the same principle: spices and alliums drawn out into a salty, acid liquid that keeps without refrigeration and can be splashed into gravy to give it depth. Mushroom and walnut ketchups long predate the tomato version in English cookery, and green walnuts pickled in midsummer were a standard larder item, which is why Beeton's closing note reads as thrift rather than novelty: the leftover liquor in the walnut jar was too valuable to pour away, and turning it into a steak relish was the obvious use for it.